Tesla Self-Driving Demonstration

Tesla released very interesting videos of the latest version of its self-driving technology on the new Autopilot 2.0 hardware.

This isn’t a flawless test run. You see the vehicle slow down unnecessarily for people running by the roadside, for example. It’s also uncertain how well this sort of demo would work in less than favorable conditions, such as snowy weather or nighttime drives on poorly-lit roads. However, it’s still impressive. The car is sufficiently aware of its environment that the driver doesn’t have to touch the wheel once, even in relatively complex situations.

A good example of the system being hesitant is at ~3:55 when it stops for joggers on the side of the road. It doesn’t look like it needed to stop and human driver probably wouldn’t have, but Tesla Vision detected the woman closest to the road as an “in-path object” and stopped for a moment.

Another interesting thing to look at is the free space detection, or in other words, where the vehicle knows it can drive. It is represented on the medium-range vehicle camera as “road flow”. You can identify a few glitches at real-time speed, but overall Tesla seems to be already quite good at it.